


5:30am

by unfortunatesideeffects



Series: Scenes from the story I'm Not Writing [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Cisswap, F/F, Some Swearing, always biologically female, and art that is not remotely graphic, and stev(i)e has a dirty mouth, bucky pov, bucky talks trash in her head, but is still probably nsfw, canon disability, captain america is not a morning person, illustrated fanfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-04
Updated: 2014-09-04
Packaged: 2018-02-16 03:17:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2253810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unfortunatesideeffects/pseuds/unfortunatesideeffects
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Ladies and gentlemen, Captain America: a paragon of dexterity and grace.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	5:30am

 

People generally assume that, if a person must be divided into lunar cycles and birdsong serenades, between the two of them Stevie is surely the one best suited for early mornings. In fact this couldn't be further from the truth, and Bucky watches lazily, fondly, as the other woman uses the counter to prop herself up, trying to execute the delicate operation that is pouring milk and keeping all that long, bed-head-blond hair out of her cereal bowl at the same time. Ladies and gentlemen, Captain America: a paragon of dexterity and grace.

 

“Stop laughing at me. I can feel you. Laughing.”

 

“Nonsense,” Bucky tells her; although, of course, she was.

 

“At least I don't come to breakfast all...legs, and feet up on the counter. You're really un...” Bucky can actually feel the struggle as she digs through her zombie-brain for the rest of the word, and feels just the tiniest bit sorry for dragging Stevie out of bed, “Sanitary. Drink your coffee like a normal person, why don't you.”

 

“Says the woman who forgot her shirt.”

 

Bucky's lost weight since she came home, and she likes breakfast because it's the only meal when Stevie's too out of it to watch what someone else is eating. There's something comforting about having a moment to look instead of being observed, a half-hour to herself to properly appreciate with other senses a body she knows so well by touch: strong and solid, tawny-skinned and -haired, blue eyes - barely touched by the gleam of the sun coming up over the horizon - heavy beneath drooping blond lashes. Bucky both loves and envies the muscles in Stevie's thighs, her shoulders, arms – which Bucky used to have, too, 'til they wasted away around her own fragile bones, gone so fast as soon as she stopped running - and started remembering instead...

 

...And Stevie has these hands – these fucking delicate, artist's hands that drawl through the air languid as any painted lady in the fanciest of galleries, dripping milk on the counter-top as she gestures with her spoon, too drugged by 5:30am to correct her messes. They're a wonder, those hands; with all the power of super-soldier shoulders behind them, oh, they can do anything. Bucky loves them so fiercely that it makes her ache, sometimes, deep behind the bars of her ribs.

 

“My tits are cleaner than your feet,” Stevie growls.

 

Bucky laughs before she even realises it, surprised out of her half-dream by the disgust in Stevie's gravel-and-dawn voice, and by the surge of affection she feels right down in her belly for _this_ Stephanie Grace Rogers. The one nobody else will ever know, who wanders around in the morning without a shirt on and isn't ashamed of any part of her body - not even the naked ones - in underwear Clint bought her because he thought it was funny (that she would never wear, of course, what is this, hi _lar_ ious, Barton) except that being a national icon does not, in fact, automatically translate to being the kind of woman who keeps up with her laundry, or the shopping, or remembers to trim her split ends in time for a press conference.

 

It helps that Bucky is still in that pleasant, liminal place where watching Stevie stalk around in literally star-spangled panties is funnier than the overflow of her washing basket is gross. But when that balance tips they'll fight about it, step all over well-trod emotional bruises, things they've fought about for almost literally a hundred years; things that, mostly, they can keep in check but which will, with the right spark, take off like tinder in a wind-tunnel and leave them panting, wasted, seven decades of small itches and gigantic, aching wounds torn open in a quarter hour, laid bare again in the cool, well-regulated light of the twenty-first century. Just because they're best friends, just because they're lovers – just because they pretty literally clawed their separate ways out of death to be together (well, not _just_ to be together, but doesn't it sound revoltingly romantic, when you frame it like that?) - doesn't mean they don't have plenty bad blood between them. They have years of it. They have oceans.

 

She and Stevie, well. They fought a lot even before the serum, when Stephanie was frail and ill and _hated_ her own body for it; and hated Bucky, too, for taking care of her when she was unable to return the favour, playing-field in a state of perpetual imbalance that, a century on, seems never quite to reach equilibrium.

 

Bucky gets that – or, no, obviously, she doesn't; you can't 'get' disabling illness and its butterfly effect if you've been healthy all your life. But she gets it more, now, than she did when they were young. Before she fell, before she froze and woke and froze again. Before she lost an arm, gained a new one, and excised 2.0 on purpose. She is familiar, now, with the gratingly soft voices of people who talk over you as you surface from the tail-end of the anaesthetist’s wasteland dreams. She knows the shape of things when you have only one hand - which is not the same as touching only half the world, but is different from being able to circle the whole one, too. Things take longer. The finger-walk from the valley of one hip-bone to the peak of the other is not synonymous with the two-handed, hips-circled experience, though it covers the same ground.

 

And Bucky thinks, now, that she understands a little more why Stevie insists on doing her own laundry (though she never has time, and when she does, draws instead); and why she wears her _underwear of patriots_ with a sort of defiance, as though to prove that she is really scraping the bottom of the dresser drawer with these ones, but that's ok, because she's healthy, now. She can take care of things herself and if she doesn't – well. That's her privilege. It's a complicated thought-process, and Bucky does not enjoy living with the results drifting, sweaty and unhygienic, from the basket in the corner of their bedroom and out across the floor. But Stevie has always been a complicated person, and Bucky feels like she's unravelled just one more knot (now she's intimately, invasively acquainted with the point where autonomy meets disability, and is summarily consumed), and in some ways things are easier, now.

 

It's unsettling to think about her poor orphaned arm as a means to redress that historical stain of inequality between them – and Stevie, she _knows_ , never, ever would – but Bucky wonders, sometimes, if, given everything (the losses, the resurrections, the final, staggeringly lucky reunion), this was the best way for it to be. To come home to Stephanie in need of care; to recoup the supposed debt accrued by all those years when Bucky held, between them, all the obviously important cards.

 

Stevie's eyes slide to hers, shaded by long lashes and a thick mass of squashed curls, yesterday evening's victorious curves degraded by the subsequent night. And Bucky tells her, over the rim of her coffee mug, “Sweetheart, I am intimately acquainted with your tits, and I assure you, there ain't nothin' clean about 'em – they're much too magnificent.”

 

The amazing Captain America flicks milk at her like a three-year-old, and scowls. But, to anyone who really knows her (that is to say, to one person, certainly) it's obvious that, really, she's just trying not to accidentally cough up a grin from somewhere beneath all that early morning grump. That's the story Bucky, at any rate, is choosing to go with.

**Author's Note:**

> I really didn't mean to write this.
> 
> I was just going to think it, but then I started drawing and the whole thing spiralled. There is at least one more part to come.
> 
>  
> 
> Please, for the love of all things satisfying and phenomenally attractive, write more cisswap Bucky/Steve, so I don't have to keep getting distracted while I try to finish something else (not that I don't enjoy writing it myself, but it's just not the same as reading).
> 
> Also, unbetaed, all errors are my own. Sorry!
> 
> Probably more of the same on [tumblr](http://unfortunatesideeffects.tumblr.com/).


End file.
